


take it black

by Trell (orphan_account)



Category: Fringe, Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fringe, Angst, Crossover, Episode: s03e09 Marionette, Infidelity, M/M, Mistaken Identity, mild emetophobia cw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-15
Updated: 2013-05-15
Packaged: 2018-01-24 07:24:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1596473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Trell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>I thought you liked it this way,</i> Dean had said then. <i>I thought he was you.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	take it black

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the Fringe universe and based off of s03e09 "Marionette," when Olivia Dunham has just returned from the Other Side and is having a hard time handling the trauma of what was done to her as well as dealing with Fauxlivia having impersonated her and slept with Peter. Castiel loosely takes on the role of Olivia, with Dean taking the role of Peter Bishop. Walter Bishop's role is filled by Metatron, and Astrid Farnsworth's by Meg. (An old AU idea, slightly updated.)

He goes home.

It doesn’t feel like home. 

Part of the wrongness is, Castiel knows, a holdover of the conditioning. (If he closes his eyes he can picture the other apartment, his would-be home, with a different color floor and band posters on the walls. But thinking of it and the man he’d lived with there makes him sick, and so he blocks it out as best he can, and doesn’t dwell.)

He stands just inside the doorway for a long time, door locked instinctively behind him, because no matter who he is or who he believes himself to be it seems he’s always the paranoid one, the one on edge.

With a pang, he realizes that there’s things on his couch that he didn’t leave there, shoes in the alcove that he’s never worn. He can see a jacket hanging over a chair in the kitchen through the hallway, and it’s a short gray coat he’s never seen, not his familiar tan raincoat.

Castiel toes off his shoes and wanders inside feeling like a ghost, an intruder in his own home. Mindlessly, he clicks on the television set, just to hear the news: just to know he’s here, not on the Other Side with its Ambered city blocks and smallpox outbreaks, its vegetative species loss and its dearth of coffee beans.

It’s set to a sitcom he doesn’t recognize instead of the evening news. He watches it for a while, unseeing and motionless where he stands by the edge of the couch, his mind like dead static until one of the characters on the screen spills their coffee and the laughtrack rolls over him like a wave.

 _I thought you liked it this way,_ Dean had said of the too-sweet coffee he’d given him. He’d looked so earnest, so scared, so guilty.

Castiel doesn’t know if his knees give out or if he simply doesn’t have the willpower and energy to stand anymore, but he sits down hard on the floor, legs folding under him, briefcase slamming down beside him.

_Cas, I’m sorry._

The laughtrack plays again; one of the women has said something funny. Castiel’s fingers are so tight around the handle of his briefcase that his knuckles are white.

_I slept with him. I thought he was you._

Laughtrack. Scene change. Commercial. They’re longer here, unconstrained by the Other Side’s widespread restrictions on private enterprise and advertisement.

_I thought he was you._

Castiel tips his head back and stares at the ceiling, at its familiar grooves and stains, and wills himself not to cry.

It doesn’t matter that he dreamed of Dean when he didn’t even know who Dean was. It doesn’t matter that starting to hallucinate Dean's presence was that sent him crashing into realization, woke him up to who he was; it doesn’t matter that the thought of Dean was all that kept him going in the harbor, in the cell, at the other Metatron’s mercy—

—it was an honest mistake that Dean made, Castiel had told himself. An honest mistake.

 _I thought he was you,_ when Castiel’s _been_ his other self, been made to think like him and live like him and they’re _nothing_ alike, it’s not just their hair color (he wants to tear out the dyed strands on his head, they're _wrong,_ not his) and the fact that his other self’s nails are trim and clean underneath while his are broken and dirtied, there’s so much more, an honest mistake, _I thought he was you—_

He gasps, hard, swallowing a sob, releases the handle of his briefcase as he curls over forward at last, the breath punched out of him, clasping both palms over his mouth. _I thought he was you._ He thinks of nights spent dreaming Dean’s voice, of the mad hope once he broke free of the conditioning that Dean would come and find him, that Dean was _looking,_ and his throat aches with the force of the sobs he’s choking down, and his vision’s blurry and when he squeezes his eyes shut tears run down his face, and he hates this, hates his other self, hates _Dean_ , hates himself for being so _attached._

_I thought he was you._

_How could you think that was me,_ Castiel didn’t say then, in the coffee shop. _How could you think that was me,_ he doesn’t say now, though it runs around and around in his head; and he sits on his living room floor and cries like a child, snot clogging his nose and tears running over his hands, shaking and heaving with the force of everything he’s trying to hold down. 

He wishes then, hazily, that he’d never realized what they were doing to him, that he hadn’t made it home. (He ignores, just then, the reality that even if nothing in his conditioning had broken, chances are they would’ve killed him to extract his doppelganger, anyway.) In the midst of hysteria, he thinks he maybe even wishes he’d never escaped the other Metatron’s operating table, the dotted lines of permanent marker on his skin coming to their fatal, final fruition.

He wishes he’d thrown the fucking coffee in Dean’s face.

_I thought he was you._

Castiel wants to cut out the parts of himself that shouldn’t be there. He wants to be the way he was before, without bits of not-him sitting in his brain and the knowledge that Dean slept with the version of him from the Other Side.

Unwanted, his mind summons up false images of Dean’s hands running over his doppelganger, of what Dean’s lips must have looked like kissing the hinge of his other self’s jaw.

“Fuck you,” he gasps out, startling himself when he takes his hands away from his mouth and croaks the words. He bends forward until his nose is brushing his knees, forehead pressed against the hardwood floor. “ _Fuck_ you,” he repeats, hoarse, head throbbing, and he’s not sure if he means his other self, or Dean, or just himself, for thinking of what they must’ve done.

He wonders, reeling, the floor beneath his head feeling like the only solid point of contact, if his other self has all the same buttons to be pressed. If he went to Dean now, if he demanded, _fuck me, you thought you had me and now you do, do everything you did to him_ —would it get Castiel off? Would he like it? Or would it be just like the coffee, _I thought you liked it this way,_ sugar where there ought to be none and creamer where it ought to be black—

Would Dean even enjoy it as much, if it was really Castiel, and not his double? _I thought he was you,_ but they’re not the same and surely that would be evident then, with Castiel in his bed, stripped down to his most vulnerable and basic, all want and _love_ rather than manipulation.

Too late, Castiel realizes he’s going to vomit, and lurches to his feet and stumbles down the hallway towards the bathroom, nearly making a wrong turn into a closet because the layout of his other self’s house had been subtly different and it’s still there, tugging the strings of his subconscious. 

He only barely manages to wrestle the toilet lid open before he empties his stomach, wrongly-made coffee and all, and slumps against the bathtub, arm slung over the edge and leaning his head against the cool porcelain.

Castiel doesn’t know how long he sits there, boneless with all the rage and pain gone out of him and TV playing in the other room until his phone vibrates, shivering its way over the linoleum where he dropped it out of his pocket while being ill.

He picks it up without thinking, doesn’t look at the caller ID, just answers and says, with a swallow and a wince at the awful acrid aftertaste, “Novak.”

It’s Dean’s voice on the other end—of course it is, a poetic underscore to Castiel’s breakdown, insult added to injury. “Listen, Gabriel’s got a case for us,” he’s saying, “some surgeon that managed to just take out a guy’s heart without actually killing him, if you’ll believe that.”

“Oh,” says Castiel. A living man with a missing heart. Poetic underscore indeed.

“But,” Dean says, going on, a little more cautiously, “if you don’t want to come—if you need some time—”

The thought of spending all night in this apartment, tainted by the presence of his double, makes Castiel want to be sick all over again, though his stomach’s too empty to make the attempt. “No,” he overrides Dean, “I want in. I’m good. I’m ready to work.”

That last one, at least, is true.

“Okay,” says Dean, a strange note in his voice. “Okay. Meg will pick you up in fifteen, all right?”

“All right,” says Castiel, and listens as the line disconnects, hears that last little hitch of breath—Dean’s sigh?—at the end, cut off by the call drop.

He listens to the dial tone for almost a minute, and only gets up to wash up and make himself presentable and ready to go when the female voice starts to tell him to hit cancel and dial again.


End file.
